Journey planners and wacky journeys

Victor

I'm travelling next weekend (sunshine is under threat) and I've been playing with journey planners over the last few days.

Sometimes, wacky journeys are suggested, including one option where the earliest possible arrival for a 10km trip to the airport meant travelling 200km - and crossing a border - and coming back, just so I can get a plane to the second country. :pac: I think I'll get a taxi.

So, why my C&T hat on, what distance becomes unreasonable in such a situation?

Twice the distance? Hardly - getting to Dublin Airport in rush hour, it would probably be worth my while going more than that out of the way, so I can avoid the city centre.

Three times? five times? Ten times?

Of course, does one measure time, distance, cost, comfort and number of interchanges (it's 30 minutes quicker on your 8 hour train journey if you take 4 trains instead of 3)? If one is to strike a balance, what is that balance?

Cookie_Monster

there's a thread on this somewhere.

Dun Laoghaire to Cherrywood tells you to go via Tara Street still...

zagmund

Coming back from Lisnaskea to Dublin a while back, my Garmin kept insisting I change from the N3 to the N2. I don't know what way I had it programmed, but it was determined to send me east even after I had turned off all avoidances (tolls, traffic, etc . . .)

z

munchkin_utd

zagmund wrote: »

Coming back from Lisnaskea to Dublin a while back, my Garmin kept insisting I change from the N3 to the N2. I don't know what way I had it programmed, but it was determined to send me east even after I had turned off all avoidances (tolls, traffic, etc . . .)

z

maybe that was before the M3 was opened?
Sat navs are programmed to prefer better category roads so motorways over national roads and national roads over unclassified or regional.
If the sat nav knows theres a motorway a few km away then often it'll send you that way rather than follow a route that you might know is better.

the best one I saw in this vein was trying to get from the Kinsale roundabout on the Cork south ring to just north of the river Lee to the west of the city centre.
Along the north quays rather than let me zip the 700m or so along the quays direct to my destination, it insisted at every bridge that I go back to south of the river presumably as it was classified as a national road!!
Crazy stuff.

LLU

Wasn't there a crazy one being served up for a time by the Irish Rail website a couple of years ago? It was even on the news.

I think that for something like Galway to Dublin it was sending you via Limerick, Cork, Waterford, etc and even an overnight stay at Rosslare port before finally bringing you to Dublin via Wicklow. The journey time was in the region of 19 hours, Lord only knows the cost!

The reason was that part of the route in the midlands was marked as being out of service and so the computer faithfully did its best to get you there some other way.

fletch

http://www.snopes.com/computer/internet/mappoint.asp

L1011

During the absolute worst of the port tunnel works, I know people who would take the train to Portmarnock and the fairly irregular bus from there to the Airport rather than risk being stuck at the Cat & Cage for an hour on a 41.

Probably 4x the journey time if both are clear runs if not more.